Very Serious Superbugs in Imported Seafood
Source: Wired
Breaking news today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, out of its open-access journal Emerging Infectious Diseases: Researchers in Canada have identified a very highly resistant bacterium in squid imported from South Korea and being sold in a Chinese grocery store.
The letter reporting the finding was supposed to go live at noon ET, but hasn’t yet. When it does, it will be linked from this page, under the subheading Letters. It is titled: “Carbapenamase-Producing Organism in Food, 2014.”
The letter, signed by Joseph E. Rubin, Samantha Ekanayake and Champika Fernando of the University of Saskatchewan, reports that, in the squid, they found a variety of a common bacterium, Pseudomonas, carrying a gene that directs production of an enzyme called VIM-2 carbapenemase. It’s the “carbapenemase” that is the troubling factor here. Carbapenems are the truly last of the few remaining last-resort antibiotics in the world. The global advance of carbapenem resistance — via superbugs such as NDM from Asia, and OXA and VIM primarily from southern Europe — is what the CDC’s director was talking about last year when he referred to the worldwide threat from “nightmare bacteria.”
Most of the spread of carbapenem resistance has been through people, who picked it up in a hospital or acquired it accidentally from contaminated water, especially in south Asia. But because carbapenem resistance largely travels via gut bacteria, some microbiologists have been apprehensive that it might get into the food chain. After all, many common foodborne diseases arrive via what’s politely called the “fecal-oral route” — which is to say, fecal bacteria got on the food you eat. Since some of those bacteria, such as E. coli, are known to carry NDM and the other carbapenemases, it made sense to wonder whether food could transmit them also. It’s an especially important question because the government surveillance programs that look for resistant bacteria on food are limited in the geographical sites, types of food, and types of bacteria they look for — so the possibility has always existed that something could sneak through.
Read more: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/cdc-vim-squid/
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I've given up seafood, and I notice comments here and there on this board that indicate others have, too.
If I do have it, it's only at home and from a USA source.
Cher
Its better for the environment.
Its better and safer for your health.
Its kinder to animals.
It tastes better and makes you feel better than processed food.
